Word: english
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...show of paintings by the English artist Leon Kossoff, which opened last ( week at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York City, ought to provoke some reflection. Kossoff, 61, is hardly known in America. He is one of the two English tortoises (the other being Frank Auerbach) who are crossing the finish line just when most of the short-winded art hyped in the 1980s has gone dead on its feet. Both are, so to speak, redemptive artists, sustaining and enlarging a tradition of the expressive human figure that seems largely to have been colonized by ham-fisted ephemerids. When...
...social matrix as though in jam (especially given Kossoff's dense pigment) -- a pictorial equivalent, as it were, of the double meaning of the Hebrew word olam, which means world but also crowd. A painting like A Street in Willesden, 1985, reminds one of how pointless the stereotypes about English art have become. It is not anecdotal, witty, light or conversational. Rather, the opposite. In Kossoff, an obdurate grandeur of intention is coupled with a deep sense of cultural continuity. What other living painter can embed groups of figures in deep space with such conviction...
...deal in Kossoff's work. The paint is never opaque; it contains streaks and underglows, akin to the suppressed radiance in Rembrandt's midtones. And there is atmosphere too. One particularly senses it in Kossoff's view of Christ Church in Spitalfields. This tall, slender building, designed by the English baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, acquires a comatose power; the columns of its portico look as thick and squat as those of Karnak, repeating the compression of Kossoff's nudes and heads. But it is the light that one most remembers, a pale, almost chalky emanation from the grainy whites...
Teachers, of course, are unhappy about the assessment, though it was nothing new. "Over the years, you're constantly bashed," says Kathy Daniels, a Chicago English teacher. "You get it from the principal; you get it from the press. Bennett just topped it all." What particularly rankles is that while accusations are flying, policies debated and remedies proposed, no one has consulted the real experts: those who do daily battle to improve the minds of students. Says Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: "Whatever is wrong with America's public schools cannot be fixed...
...that the burgeoning population of students from non-English-speaking households, and the teacher's primary task -- to convey knowledge -- can become nearly impossible. "Society has taken the position that teachers ought to succeed with everybody: the economically disadvantaged, racial minorities, the handicapped," says P. Michael Timpane, president of Teachers College at Columbia University. "No one took those issues seriously a generation...